“FTP, Bro’,” my brother Byron said to me over the phone in my motel room two nights ago in Santa Barbara.  The miles had been slow and disturbing on southbound Highway 101 on my way to my uncle Seab’s funeral, and I was headed for a badly needed shower when he called from Aunt Elleen’s place.  He needed some time with me bad, I could tell—he was in one of those family moods he gets into.  He was wondering about staying in my room with me instead of with our aunt and the gang, but I told him that though he was welcome, there was only one bed, and he decided to hang where he was.  We talked about the drive, and the memories.  We’ve both spent more childhood time on that highway that ran between the two families than I care to think about.  Joyful memories were flickering for me, of running through the woods in Santa Barbara with my cousins.  The extended families were huge, and there’s a beautiful cemetary down there that I feel like I grew up in.  I’m certainly one to remark on his mood—obviously I was in some sorry state myself.  I looked at the ceiling and pictured Byron’s face on the other end of the line.  “FTP,” I mused into the phone.  “Let’s see….F….T….”

“The last two words are ‘The Past,’” Byron said.

So now I’m back at home and sitting here in front of my laptop, and the whiskey is going down way too easy, and I can already tell that this will be one of those journal entries I don’t show to anyone at all.  But hell, that’s what journals are for—to allow you to ramble aimlessly to no one but yourself when you don’t have any answers.  So hey, I’m fine!  I’ve got a glass in my hand and a keyboard under my fingers, and there’s no problem in this world I can’t say something stupid about.

The redeeming quality about life is that at the end of it a bunch of people get together in a room and say nice things about you.  When you’re little and when you’re dead—that’s when people are nice to you.  The trouble with memorial services, though, is that they’re wasted on the living.  The only human being in history to manage to hear his own eulogy was Tom Sawyer.  Clever boy.  No wonder he ended up so famous.

So God sent Jesus down to experience this mortal existence for him, and Jesus came back with his forehead all scratched up and holes in his wrists and ankles, and he said to his dad, “Y’know what, this is a bitch!”  Or so Christian doctrine was described to Susan and I two years ago through a communal alcoholic fog at a bar on the Santa Cruz Wharf after our Monterey Bay kayak crossing.  The analysis came from an amazing personality who was throwing money and evangelism around the room in equally inspiring quantities.  It’s the first time I’ve been disinclined to take one of them on in debate, though Susan engaged him repeatedly.  But for me, the entertainment and the drinks were too good, and besides, he’d asserted that this life is a bitch, and some statements are simply unassailable.

I do love the profound things, though.  Life, love, death, political conventions, and unbalanced Christians.  I just don’t want any of them to get too close to me, that’s all.  From unbalanced Christians I’m protected by my atheism.  From political conventions I’m protected by the power switch on the television I don’t own.  Life, love and death have me by the balls.  Well, love does anyway.

I’ll probably figure all this out on my death bed half a second after I lose my power of speech.  The blinding light will dawn, and out will come a choking stammer of consonants and vowels, revelations reduced to refuse; a series of glottal double-clutches, here and there a hard C stumbling over a long O, a whining expellation of air, and finally a string of expletives reduced by a discreet god to a less offensive babble, as the lights go out.  “What did he say?” a roomful of dearly beloved kayakers will murmur.  “What were his last words?”

“….Coca-Cola,” someone will reverently intone.  “He said, ‘Coca-Cola.’”

Good reason to die without waking.  Drug overdose is good.  Remove the damned consciousness, then kill yourself.  Safer that way.  I’ve always had my doubts about jumping off a cliff, because I vividly remember the childhood experience of falling off the top bunk in my sleep and snapping to full awareness roughly halfway down.  That might have been the night I lost all respect for human consciousness.

Aw, screw this, I’m going to bed.

Carl Schaeffer is dead.  Passed away yesterday evening.  My old office mate.

Good night.